7/10/2009 @ 11:00AM

Baseball's Most Overpaid Players

Is Derek Jeter an All Star? Absolutely. Is he overpaid? You better believe it. With a batting average above .300 and an on-base percentage pushing .400, Jeter definitely earned his slot at Tuesday’s game, but with a salary of $21.6 million, he’s also pro baseball’s most overpaid player by a wide margin.

Consider: The average 2009 salary for a starting shortstop in the American League is $2.7 million. The second highest paid after Jeter, Oakland’s Orlando Cabrera, makes $4 million. That Jeter rakes in eight times what an average starting shortstop does, while putting up only marginally better numbers, is the biggest disparity between a player and his positional peers in major league baseball. Intangibles like leadership qualities, a big part of Jeter’s popularity, are fine, but it’s tough to argue they should push a players’ salary off the charts.

By and large, baseball’s most overpaid players aren’t average producers getting paid like stars, although there are a few of those, such as Reds catcher Ramon Hernandez and Giants outfielder Randy Winn. Nor are they all fading veterans finishing out big contracts like Colorado’s Todd Helton.

No, the most overpaid players in baseball are the stars. The game’s salary structure, which calls for widely varying pay scales based on service time, has exploded at the top. Big market teams, under pressure to win from fans that know the team has money to spend, bid up the salaries of top players hitting the market to heights far out of whack with the rest of the market.

Take Carlos Beltran and Torii Hunter. Both are 2009 All Stars, outstanding center fielders that made it big in small markets, Hunter in Minnesota and Beltran in Kansas City. When Beltran hit free agency after the 2004 season (following a brief stop in Houston), the New York Mets, desperate to turn their team around, overwhelmed him with a seven-year, $119 million contract. Hunter followed suit four years later with a five-year, $90 million deal with the Los Angeles Angels. The result: The disparities of Beltran’s and Hunter’s salaries with other starting major league center fielders are far greater than the disparities in their production.

To measure this year’s most overpaid players at the All-Star break, we compared the major offensive stats–batting average, home runs, runs batted in and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, now a major metric of production) of each player to the league average for starters at his position. Then we did the same with salaries. Hunter’s number at the break (17 HR, 63 RBI, .304 batting average and .946 OPS) certainly outpace the American League’s other 13 starting center fielders, who average eight homers, 31 RBI, .265 batting average and .754 OPS. But Hunter’s $18 million salary this year is almost six times what the league’s other center fielders make, on average.

Statistically, Hunter scores 53% better than his peers on the field, while collecting 478% more money. Yikes. The comparison is similar for Beltran, who will sit out the All Star Game with an injury, in the National League.

Pitchers were measured by the number of innings and earned run average each compiled compared to the league average, along with their winning percentages relative to their teams. Some of the most overpriced pitchers this year include Detroit’s Nate Robertson ($7 million for a 7.71 ERA) and Cincinnati’s Bronson Arroyo ($10.1 million; ERA close to six), though no pitchers cracked our top 10. The biggest money risk with pitchers is injury–the Yankees’ Chien-Ming Wang, Tampa Bay’s Scott Kazmir and Boston’s John Smoltz and Daisuke Matsuzaka are just a few of the expensive pitchers we didn’t count as underachievers due to significant time on the disabled list.

The top dogs cashing in around the league can thank the Yankee organization, of course, the best friend the baseball player’s union ever had. Outfielder Johnny Damon and catcher Jorge Posada (both making $13 million, multiples of what their peers do) join Jeter on the all-overpaid top 10 list. Others include the Cubs’ Kosuke Fukudome ($12.5 million) and the Orioles’ Brian Roberts ($8 million).

True, the artificially low salaries of younger players–those with less than three years service time have little leverage and tend to make less than $1 million annually–drag down the league average. But maybe that’s just the point. Moving to a true free market for all players’ services would benefit the business, as the extra supply on the market each year would mean an end to teams chasing a handful of top stars each winter. Hunter wouldn’t command $18 million a season with a dozen or so other center fielders on the market. Meantime, the salaries of good younger players would rise as the market reached equilibrium.

Will it ever happen? Not likely, thanks to the players association. When it comes to fighting a salary cap, the union is all for free markets. But constraints that benefit players–such as minimum salaries and limited free agency that controls the supply of players each year–are just fine. The owners pretty much have to live with what they created. And Jeter, Hunter and Beltran can laugh all the way to the bank.